Banksy NFTs a Booming Business
HISTORIC BANKSY MURAL OFFERED AS AN NFT EDITION — WITH A CHANCE TO OWN A $1M UNIQUE ARTWORK BY THE ARTIST
Banksy has been back in the news, offering to sell a stencil of his mural on Reading Prison and selling novelty t-shirts in the name of the four on trial for the dismantling of the Edward Colston statue — just one of these t-shirts swiftly turned up for resale online at £9,000.
Now however, art restoration company Exposed Walls are working to change the exclusivity of owning a piece of Banksy. They will be offering ‘Gorilla in a Pink Mask’, one of Banksy’s wall works created around 2001 in his home city of Bristol. The mural is believed to be the first time Banksy portrayed a primate in his work: a piece of imagery which later became emblematic in his work as he criticised human society by comparing them to their nearest relatives, the monkey. Recently, another one of his primate pieces, ‘Devolved Parliament’ (2009) sold for £9 million at Sotheby’s.
‘Gorilla in a Pink Mask’, was nearly lost when it was painted over in 2011.A spokesman for Exposed Walls said that ‘Exposed Walls tends to focus on works that are on the verge of being lost to history, as was the case with Gorilla in a Pink Mask. Our intention is for this piece to one day be housed in a museum.’
The NFT will be fractionalised, with each owner of an NFT receiving a certificate of authentication confirming their possession not only of the NFT, but also of a segment of the wall on which the ‘Gorilla in a Pink Mask’ is painted.
Exposed Walls is also offering holders of the NFT the chance to own another one-off work by Banksy with a potential value of $1m themselves. This work will be announced when the ‘Gorillla’ edition is sold out and be awarded randomly to one of the holders of the NFTs. They will have the choice of having the physical artwork or a unique NFT depicting it.
Anyone wishing to acquire the Banksy NFT is requested to register their interest on a website dedicated to the sale, linked here. They will be notified of the platform on which it will be sold, as well as the edition number, price and the day of the sale. The company plans to offer a series of other works by Banksy as NFTs in the near future, and a portion of the sales will be donated to two charities, The Gorilla Organisation and Developing Health and Independence (DHI).
For more information, visit their website from this link.
